Liberalism, Perfectionism and Workfare

Liberalism, Democratic Citizenship, and Welfare Reform: The Troubling Case of Workfare

Appraising Workfare Programs

Workfare programs aim to reduce poverty by providing low-wage work to those who need it. They are often turned to in a crisis when there is no time for a rigorous evaluation. This paper offers som e simple analytic tools for a rapid ex-ante appraisal of an existin g workfare program. For pedagogic purposes, the two programs studied are stylized versions of a range of actual programs found i n p...

Workfare, Monitoring, and Efficiency Wages

The impact of a stronger work requirement for welfare recipients in a workfare program is studied in an efficiency wage model where a representative firm chooses its level of monitoring activities. A stricter workfare policy raises employment and monitoring activities. It typically increases profits and reduces the tax rate. The impact on the net wage is ambiguous. Utility levels of employed wo...

Pluralism, Relativism, and Liberalism

One major focus of recent value‐pluralist literature has been the question of what normative consequences follow from pluralism. This essay critically examines three arguments that attempt to show that either liberalism or a bounded modus vivendi is the state of affairs that pluralism makes morally preferable. All three arguments are shown to encounter the same fundamental problem—once we have ...

Conservatism, Liberalism and Nationalism:

SCIENCE CONTINUES It was no just in relationship to commerce, industry and social welfare, however, that the great scientific achievements of the nineteenth century had an impact. By this time the perspectives of the Enlightenment had so affected both philosophy and science that the climate was more favorable than ever for asking totally new kinds of questions and for challenging old assumption...